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equal synthesis of prose and image, he probably who became one of the celebrated authors of the
would not have undertaken this work. Moreover, Second Empire.
what Saint-Victor saw as the conventional result of
his text-driven interpretation of the Odes was a bit- On 26 December of 1813, while attempting to
ter disappointment to one who had envisioned a board an English frigate off the coast of Morbihin,
sort of immortality from this collaboration.8 Saint-Victor was arrested and taken to Paris where
Nevertheless, Saint-Victor retained the hope that he was imprisoned as a spy for the exiled Louis
Girodet might later chose to return to the project XVIII.9 He spent only a matter of weeks in prison
and include his illustrations in a later edition. This due to a lack of evidence for his being a royalist agent
hope was never to be realised. Girodet’s illustrated (which he was), and the fact that the Napoleonic
version was published posthumously in 1825, bare- regime was fast waning towards the emperor’s abdi-
ly a year after the artist’s death.That their friendship cation only three months later.10
ultimately survived the Anacreon project is evi-
denced not only by the present portrait – in which Financial crisis and his disillusionment with the ideal
Girodet immortalised his friend as a scholar, an of a constitutional monarchy, as embodied by Louis
homme de letters and a beacon of aristocratic liberal- XVIII under the Bourbon Restoration, impelled
ism, but also by the fact that three years later, Saint- Saint-Victor to decamp to America in 1830,11 where
Victor dedicated the reissue of his Voyage du Poète to he lived for about three years dispatching regular
the painter. bulletins home to fellow royalists such as his friend
Arsène, le Comte de O’Mahony (1727-1858).
Born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Upon his return to France around 1834, Saint-
Haiti), Jacques de Saint-Victor became a renowned Victor published a volume of these letters and sub-
journalist of a decidedly conservative, but by no sequently took over La France as editor-in-chief. He
means reactionary bent. He was at one time, an edi- also lived for some time in Fribourg and then Rome,
tor of the Journal des débats et des décrets, the mouth- before finally retiring to Paris, where he died in
piece for the liberal ideal of a constitutional monar- 1858. His notable work as a journalist and scholar
chy and its supporters. He also contributed to the aside, Saint-Victor is perhaps best remembered as a
royalist daily Drapeau blanc. In 1812, he married poet, specifically the author of the lyric ode to hope
Marie-Joséphine-Augustine de Tourmont, who bore in the face of oppression, L’Espérance (1802), one of
him three children: Alice, Eudoxie, who inherited the most celebrated lines of which was: ‘Consolez-
Girodet’s portrait of her father, and his son, Paul, vous, pensez à la’immortalité.’

8. Ibid., p. 163.
9. Saint-Victor was rumoured to have attempted this mission as part of a plot to oust Napoléon and replace him with Louis XVIII. See C. Beuchat, Paul
de Saint-Victor – SaVie. Son Œuvre, Paris, 1937, p. 3.
10. Journal de débats…, 30 May, 1814, p. 4.
11. Beuchat, op. cit

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